New Delhi: These days, reports of any virus outbreak make me jittery. Just in the past few weeks, I have had more than one reason to worry. The first, HKU5-CoV-2. A new coronavirus discovered in bats in China. It uses the same receptors as the SARS-CoV-2 virus which caused the Covid-19 pandemic. That means there’s one more virus candidate that can easily and fatally infect us humans.

The second, on January 29, Uganda officially declared an Ebola outbreak caused by the Sudan virus in its capital, Kampala. The first victim was a 32-year-old man, who worked as a nurse in a hospital.

The third, a yet-unidentified culprit, has killed more than 50 people in Congo within hours of their getting infected. The victims include three children, whose initial symptoms included fever and diarrhea but quickly progressed to vomiting of blood before death. Apparently, the kids had eaten a bat.

When Covid-19 struck, the world we lived in was still a fairly friendly place. Countries got along, more or less, with each other; global institutions — despite their shortcomings — worked after a fashion; and, more importantly, researchers and doctors had no trouble collaborating across borders. Result: vaccines (never mind the controversy around them) to combat the virus were rolled out in record time.

Yet, Covid-19 killed more than 7 million people worldwide, destroyed $9 trillion in economic value, and pushed........

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